Mapping SharePoint's to Drive Letters?

[DanielCayea]

OneDrive and SharePoint are great ways to keep files in the cloud but I discover that having some line of business apps that are not cloud aware/enabled decreases productivity of employees who have to download form the cloud to store locally to work with the LOB apps and if updates are made to the files, then have to be uploaded again.

Is there a way to map a SharePoint or a OneDrive to a drive letter to operate in the same or similar fashion as a mapped network drive?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @DanielCayea - No, there's no good way to map a drive letter to a SharePoint or OneDrive library (this question has come up a number of times in this community: see this search result)

As I understand it, the basic issues revolve around authentication and user experience.

That said, what you need to look at is the OneDrive desktop app to sync files (it can sync both OneDrive and SharePoint).  It's what we tell our end users to do for apps that can't open/save files directly in OneDrive/SharePoint.  End users must sync the libraries that they need to interact with most often.

There are limits to this approach - (see this Microsoft support article)

• You shouldn't try to sync more than one hundred thousand files
• You must set up the sync for the specific libraries/folders
• If you need to interact with lots of libraries, you'll have to sync them all - and may run into limits

[#3]

Our agency is looking to move our legacy file shares into the cloud and we want to replicate that user experience as much as possible; we have folders and subfolders with different sets of security permissions depending on the employees role; I believe from a security perspective we can replicate that, but it doesn't seem like sync'ing sharepoint libraries will replicate the file access experience very well...

Am I wrong and will OneDrive sync'ing SharePoint be able to do this? Or, will we have to investigate other ways to replicate this experience to end users?

[#4]

When we migrated to the cloud, we pushed our end users that this was the time to develop new habits, or working in a modern way. Things were changing and it's time to take advantage of the cloud, which includes rethinking habits that were first learned decades ago (mapped drives; network shares; etc.).

From my experience, trying to replicate an on premises experience to the cloud will lead to frustrated end users because you can't replicate it exactly.

[#5]

I agree that many cloud solutions sacrifice the end-user experience in favor of convenience for the administration of the system. And let's not forget how inconsistent (due to latency issues and overall synchronization delays and failures) the vendor recommended sync solutions simply fail to meet the actual use cases of the on premise app experiences that the cloud promises to deliver.

[#6]

I am certainly a proponent of change but not just for the sake of change; the cloud does provide benefits but only in who is responsible in taking care of the infrastructure. All of the cloud is, is just someone elses server, storage, network, etc. If the file solution can't be as flexible or programmable as those in years past but you still want cloud; might as well sets up a file share VM in Azure or AWS and VPN to it.

[#7]

@DanielCayea 

YOu should all look at IAM Cloud and their product Cloud Drive Mapper - which removes all the sync issues with OneDrive. Has been instrumental in our migrations.